MY PATH TO PUBLICATION

The debut author of dystopian YA always wondered if she could be a writer – and began her journey into print when she started taking her dream of publication seriously

© Jo Bishop

Ididn’t grow up surrounded by books. It was music that first gave me a love of language. My Grandad had an enormous record player, and it was a communal event to curate a playlist. The lyrics fascinated me – the way writers put them together in unusual ways. Whether it was Maria Mckee’s flashing fever or The Lightning Seeds’ splash autumn on gardens, I wanted to be able to do that, to sum up a feeling or an image in a neat package of words.

I did find books. At first, it was through listening to teachers read aloud: to the west-country slurp of Miss Schunk’s BFG or the Californian drawl of Dr. Storey’s Lennie. At university, I studied literature and took a creative writing module. One of my lecturers compared my writing to DH Lawrence. Your prose soared, she wrote at the bottom. I began to wonder: could I?